99¢ Butterflies

He was driving back from the rock and his kid was mourning the departure. He promised he’d get them a place one day. He’d only tasted the words when they spotted the for sale sign on the side of the road.

“It was real faded, old,” he tells me. His eyes are a damp green blue, a cough drop lodged in the throat of the sea. I feel my own family in his skin and hair and the way he uses his hands to help his lips shape stories. “Like it was probably already sold, you know.”

But he called, and it wasn’t sold.

“Guy wanted 5000 for it and I almost said yes right there. But then, okay, there’s a lot of work to be done. New roof, heating… So I got him down to 3500.”

His palms flash as he remembers childhood: 9 of them piled into the car, driving down the Trans Canada Highway, always passing the cabin with the carved wooden butterflies decorating its front. The for sale sign turned out to be right there- stranger hands hammered hope right on top of that childhood memory.

Monte stretched his fingers past the binds of blisters. Put a new roof on, fixed it up, painted the sides electric blue. He bought a wood stove from a stranger for $40. It had slumbered beneath the floorboards for 30 years because its owner “hated the smoke filling filling the house, hated having wood in the house, all of it”. It lived lifelessly in that basement but it stayed alive. He wrapped his palms around that great iron belly and carried it over the crumbling threshold like a bride.

Monte bought butterflies from the Dollarstore and glued them to the front of his house. An homage to what came before, to both the fleetingness and eternity of stories. 99 cent butterflies become a lesson- human life is cheap and flimsy but when you watch it from a distance, the story shivering inside the setae, casting shadows across the future- it is beautiful, if weak.

“How does the propane work for the stove?” I want to know.

“I’m not sure how it works exactly,” Monte shrugs, “but it works.”

The cabin rests in Cape Ray on the Trans Canada Highway, its back facing the mountains, shoulder blades against the shoreline. Salmon River is a deceptive name- the river is thick with trout and it snakes through the landscape like a fault line trying to get it right and continuously falling off the wagon. At the beach the man catches fish, easy as “fishing in a bucket”. He lays them on the shore and pauses to take a photograph, sunlight glinting off belly scales, his Swiss Army knife resting in the sand.

He didn’t know where to spread his mother’s ashes. He knew exactly where to spread his mother’s ashes once he’d found his home. Sometimes he hikes to the abandoned radio tower, forgotten ghosts signalling stories through the wind. He plants her at the base of the tower, beneath dead strangers’ secrets, and when he pauses to eternalize his fish in a sea of lightbox, he splashes her eternity against the foam that hugs the shore. When he’s eaten six fish and the moose sausages from the hunter down the mountain he will get back into bed, full to sleeping. I imagine his rough fingers pulling the quilt up to his eyelashes.

Monte tells me about the gold panning he’s waiting to add to his list of hobbies.

“You can’t get up there by car, but I drove the truck up far as I could.”

He wants to catch atomic number 79 in a sieve so that when people ask him what he’s doing between the Salmon and the tidal roar of highway he can say, “Making moose sausage, catching trout, and panning for gold.”

The last text he sent: "Heartbreak. Grey cabin sold." I can't pan for hope beside him, our knees digging silent promise into mountain river bank. I wait for him to send the photographs of nightfall, handmade flames balancing stars on the tips of their tongues. That'll help the hope, keep that coal ignited in the dark of my gut.

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